(The thoughts expressed below are entirely personal and meant for constructive criticism only. I do not mean to condemn any organisation, firm or corporation in any way. In particular, Guardian is an extremely great online article database which contains many interesting and intellectual articles worth reading.)

Thumbs down for Guardian: an essay of constructive criticism

Present tense. The power of persuasion. Watch out for super-achievers. These are the latest articles in This column will change your life, Guardian.co.uk. Granted, being in the present, possessing strong persuasive skills and learning about the dangers of looking up to geeks (really?) are useful insights into personal growth and success and relationship development. However, where is The importance of responsibility? Against the backdrop of our perpetually evolving world with increasingly many issues on responsibility (or more accurately the lack thereof) however not matched with an equal number of articles on responsibility, has responsibility really gone down the drain?

Certainly not. Corporate responsibility still stands as one of the fundamental pillars of business practice; CEOs and leaders are, in general, responsible individuals. We still live in a world which runs on moral and legal accountability (perhaps arguably with the exception of banks and some poverty-stricken states). Yet ironically, we are too familiar with our parents' and grandparents' jeremiad about the increasing trend of a lack of responsibility in us. This is conceivably true, inasmuch as teenage pregnancy and teenage gangsterism crime figures are high and rising. However, there is definitely more than meets the eye - why the deep, exhausted sigh of disappointment from our forefathers if we could simply educate ourselves or be educated not to commit teenage adultery and crime? This, I believe, is due to our disregard for responsibility in all its permutations and aspects. Our lives seem to be more profit-driven than value-driven with increasing competition within our small nation and even with our counterparts all around the word. Sportsmen and coaches compete in championships to the extent of engaging in quarrels and unsporting fights; academic students struggle to attain 5 Dean's lists and the A grade which, to us, is the symbol of absolute perfection. Rarely do we bother to greet our teachers nowadays, simply because all we care about them is whether they can deliver the knowledge content and, perhaps in the last few months of high school, write a good college recommendation letter for us. Of course, being competitive has its concrete advantages and benefits: students with straight A's enter the Ivy League and experience "a radical change in their lives", and it might even obligate us to learn to be courteous and respectful to our peers and tutors for a better recommendation letter and testimonial on top of our colourful CVs. But all of these hardly qualify as individual morality or creed; they are just manifestations of pragmatism.

Incidents of lending money to friends without them paying the sum back are common, and - perhaps less obvious - some of us sleep late simply because we want to spend time with friends (this is irresponsible because we, as students, should place learning on top of everything else, and by sleeping late we make ourselves tired and unable to concentrate during lessons, thus not fulfilling our responsibility of being a student). Honestly, my experiences with money-lending have not been pleasant - I had to gently remind a few of my friends after a few weeks that they owed my cash. In all my life, I have always been told and taught to return money to people whom I borrowed from immediately, simply because it is responsible for me to do so (if I don't return it immediately, I am keeping something which belongs to someone else and that's irresponsible [from a Confucian perspective, for that matter]). Of course, the story for sleeping early is similar, but I concede that I unfortunately have not been disciplined enough to sleep early for the past few years (I now try my best to sleep early and interact more in school to compensate for the fall in number of MSN and GoogleTalk chats). However, the point here is that we should take responsibility for what we do and be responsible individuals, and we should do so even in the trivial aspects of our lives because many of our small actions reflect and represent our true level of responsibility.

To quote Confucius, 恭，宽，信，敏，惠《论语，阳货》. Confucius tells us that there are values which are indispensable to nurturing benevolence, and these values include moral and mental accountability, or responsibility. In saying this, Confucius certainly wants the man seeking self-improvement to let responsibility be a part of his creed.

So let's be responsible. Let's fix our moral compasses. And the world will be less screwed up.

Labels: thoughts